Commentary
Do You Want To Succeed At Soc Media Or Soc Media Marketing?
- by Augie Ray , August 24, 2010
Do you want to succeed at social media or social media marketing?
There is a difference--a huge difference. It's the difference between using social media tools and adopting social
media philosophy; the difference between sparking posts about your marketing and posts about your product or service; and the difference between marketers who focus externally on how the brand is
broadcast versus internally on how the brand is realized.
So do you want to succeed at social media or social media marketing? The answer is the former, but many marketers focus on
the latter. I'd like to make this difference more real by sharing two examples--the first in the entertainment industry, and the second my own experiences in a mall this weekend.
"Snakes on a Plane" (SoaP) is the entertainment industry's greatest pre-release social media success story to date. The Guardiancalled it "Perhaps the most internet-hyped film of all time." Fans produced their own T-shirts, posters, trailers, novelty songs, and parodies. Producers organized a contest to select a fan's music for use in
the movie. The filmmakers added shooting days in order to implement changes suggested by fans on the Internet (including Samuel Jackson's famous and unprintable-on-this-blog line about
"m&f%*#f+!@ing snakes".)
But what were all these fans fans of? Not the product, apparently. As Entertainment Weeklyput it, "SOAP came in below even the most ridiculously cynical predictions." The reasons why the social media buzz failed to produce
business success are many (including that the PG-13 film was edited to an R rating due to fan input, a change that fatally narrowed the audience--so much for the wisdom of crowds), but in the end
SoaP was a social media marketing success but a social media failure.
To move the discussion out of the theater and into the mall, I am struck by how few retailers are paying attention
to the difference between social media success and social media marketing success. This weekend I visited three retailers in search of men's apparel:
*
Retailer One: I spent 15 minutes trying to find someone to offer assistance. The only employees to be found were behind checkout counters with long lines. I left frustrated.
* Retailer Two: I walked into a fitting room to try on shirts and found it looking like Hell's storage room (or
an average teen's bedroom) with deep piles of clothes. I left disgusted.
* Retailer Three: I entered Nordstrom and found a store that was clean and
staffed. I got attention and helpful assistance from an employee. And I spent $250.
Retailers One and Two are plotting social media marketing success. They have "Join us
on Facebook" links on their home pages--one has 500,000 fans and the other has 1 million. They've enabled their catalogs with social tools so that site visitors can share products with their
social networks. They run social promotions including online events and sales. And they spark engagement around fashion trends and scintillating discussion starters such as "Pick your
preference: black or brown shoes?"
But what good does this all do if these retailers fail to provide the sort of real-world experience that get people saying positive things? While tools
customers can use to post stuff to social networks are helpful, what matters more are experiences that inspire people to engage with and about the brands in social ways. I don't think it is
any coincidence that since the recession began in December 2007, Nordstrom's stock (JWN) is down just 10 percent while the stock of the other two retailers is down between 30 and 50 percent.
And while Nordstrom has fewer Facebook fans than the other two retailers, it has more fans-per-location based on it 193 stores. Nordstrom succeeds at both social media and social media
marketing.
Does your organization want to be "Snakes on a Plane" or does it want to be Nordstrom? Do you want people buzzing about your marketing or about your product or service?
The difference is not found on Facebook or Twitter, but in the ways companies are led. Marketing leaders who only focus on messages in social channels but fail to attend to how the brand is
realized in actual product and service experiences may succeed with social media marketing -- but fail miserably with social media.
Nice distinction Augie - too many marketers approach social media like... well, marketers. They approach it as a stand-alone effort to sell to community rather than being part of it. They need to think about connecting vs. selling and they need to align their approach with their overall business model in a way that supports their unique value proposition. You'd think that by now more marketers would get this.
You blew your opening (which you say is to choose "social media" over "social media marketing") by concluding that Nordstrom's succeeds at BOTH. And that is the true, honest answer for any "business" doing social media. If you don't succeed at both, you are wasting the boss's time and money. This notion that you can just listen and "plant seeds" is spun a hundred times a day by bloggers everywhere.
A truly successful business operates on all cylinders: all business functions, at all touch points.
Seems like this is the old sizzle and steak marketing conundrum. Sizzle alone is a waste of everyone's time especially among Millennials (44% complained about a brand online in last 12 months according to recent eMarketer study). Steak alone is a raw piece of meat indistinguishable from the competition. Unquestionably, marketers need to serve their steak according to the customer's expectations, ideally creating a memorable and meaningful experience in the process. That said, social media can be both steak and sizzle as is the case with Twelpforce, mycharitywater.org and @DellOutlet. Chew on that...
Great point Augie. I believe that brands must align their social media presence with their physical brick and mortar presence in order to maintain comparable brand image within both mediums. Too many brands are focusing on how many friends they can obtain or how many promotions they can run. Surely providing an in-store coupon through a brand’s social media site will drive traffic to the store but what good does it do if the store is driving traffic right out the door? Using this strategy to maintain social media may actually damage it at the same time.